The Sportswriter (16 page)

But the First Presbyterians of Haddam offer a good, safe-and-sound approach to things. Their ardent hope is to bring you down to earth by causing your spirit to lift—a kind of complex spiritual orienteering. The regulars all have no doubts about what they’re there for; they’re there to be saved or give a damned good impression of it, and nobody’s pulling the wool over anybody else’s eyes.

What I could read off the marquee, however, seemed strange business, though it will probably turn out to be as ordinary as toast—a trick to lure the once-a-year guys into thinking church has changed.

“The Race To The Tomb”

The preacher will have some witty, eyebrow-arching joke to start off: “Now this fella, Jesus, he was really some heckuva peculiar kind of guy, wouldn’t you say so?” And we all would. Then straight away we’d get to the hard-nosed corroborating of the resurrection and suggesting how such a fate might be ours.

I slipped on by, gave Officer Carnevale the lucky thumbs-up, which he managed moodily to return, then drove straight over to The Presidents—up Tyler, down Pierce and winding a sinewy way to Cleveland Street, before stopping under a giant tupelo across from 116, X’s little white clapboard colonial. Her Citation sat in the narrow drive, an unknown blue car parked at the curb.

Quick as a ferret I left my car, crossed the street, crouched and laid my hand on the hood of the unknown blue car—a Thunderbird—then stole back to mine before anyone on Cleveland Street could see. As I had hoped, the Bird was as cold as a murderer’s heart, and I was relieved to believe it belonged to a neighbor, or to some relative visiting the Armentis next door. Though it could’ve been a suitor I knew nothing about—one of the fat-belly credit card boys from the country club, a thought which changed relief back to doubt.

My plan had been to pay an innocent visit. I hadn’t seen Paul and Clarissa in four days, a long interval in the normal course of our lives. The two of them usually waltz by after school, eat a sandwich, sit and chat together, rummage around their former rooms the way they used to, play Yahtzee or Clue, read books, all while I try by fervent misdirection to prove a continuity in their little lives with my presence. Periodically I quit the work I’m doing and clump upstairs to tease and flirt with them, answer their questions, challenge them and try to woo them back to me in some plain and forthright way, a strategy they’re wise to but don’t mind because they love me, know I love them, and have no choice, really. We are, all four of us in this, a solid and divided family, doing our level bests to see our duty clearly.

Last night I hoped to stay for a drink, see the kids to bed, yak with X for half an hour, then end up, possibly, spending the night on the couch, something I hadn’t done in some time (not, in fact, since I met Vicki) but felt a fierce urge to do suddenly.

Still if I’d gone hat-in-hand up to the door, on a mission of somber fatherhood, I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t have interrupted an
intime
—the kids away on overnights at the Armentis, the lights turned up to facilitate the best atmosphere of grownup-bittersweet-excitement-since-so-much-has-gone-before, for the benefit of neighbors interested in seeing a proud woman make the best of a fractured life. I would’ve been thunderstruck to intercept some well-dressed corporate-level type with love in his eyes, athwart the precise couch I hoped to curl up on. X would’ve been in her rights to say I’d torpedoed her attempts at getting her feet on the ground, and the fellow would’ve been in his rights to run me out or punch me. And we’d have both ended up having to leave (the two men always have to trudge off into the night alone, though occasionally they become friends if they meet up later in a bar).

My whole scenario, in short, had lost its glow, and I was left in the dark understory, facing the blue intruder car with nothing to do more than breathe the plush air and endorse X’s neighborhood. The Presidents, with their precise fifty-foot frontages, their mature mulberries and straight sidewalks, are actually an excellent location for a young, divorced lady with children, steady means and an independent bent, to dig her heels in. Up and down the street are other young free-thinking people on the way someplace in the world, sharp-eyed, idealistic folks who spotted a good investment and acted fast, and now have some value to sit on. The immigrant Italians who built them (some chosen right out of Sears catalogs) now prefer Delray Beach and Fort Myers and citizens’ groups more their own age, and have left their neighborhoods to the young, though hardly ever their own young, who prefer the likes of Pheasant Run and Kendall Park. The banks have proved compassionate with mortgage points and variable rates, and as a result the young liberals—most of them prospering stockbrokers, corporate speech writers, and public defenders—have revived a proud, close-knit neighborhood and property-value ethic where everybody looks after everybody else’s kids and grinds their own espresso. Bright new façades and paint jobs. New footings dug. A reshingled weather stoop. Smart art-deco numerals and a pane of discreetly stained glass done at home. All of it promisingly modern.

X, I think, is happy here. My children are close to their school, their friends and me. It is not the same as Hoving Road where we all once hung our hats, but things change in ways none of us can expect, no matter how damn much we know or how smart and good-intentioned each of us is or thinks he is. Who’d know that Ralph would die? Who’d know that certainty would grow rare as diamonds? Who’d know our home would be broken into and everything suddenly break apart? Did Walter Luckett know he’d meet Mr. Wrong two nights ago and alter his life again after his wife already had? No, you bet not. None of our lives is really ordinary; nothing humdrum in our delights or our disasters. Everything is as problematic as geometry when it’s affairs of the heart in question. A life can simply change the way a day changes—sunny to rain, like the song says. But it can also change again.

The clock at St. Leo the Great sounded ten, and something began happening at 116 Cleveland.

The yellow stoop light flashed on. Someone inside spoke in a tone of patient instruction, and the front door opened. My son, Paul, stepped out.

Paul in tennis shorts, and a Minnesota Twins shirt I brought him from a trip I took. He is ten, small and not overly clever yet, a serious, distractable boy with a good heart, and all the sweet qualities of second sons: patience, curiosity, some useful inventiveness, sentimentality, a building vocabulary, even though he is not much of a reader. I have tried to think that things will turn out well for him, though when we powwow up in his room, a place he keeps furnished with Sierra Club posters of eagles and large Audubon mergansers and grebes, he always seems to display a moody enthrallment, as if there is some sovereign event in his life he senses is important but cannot for some reason remember. Naturally I am very proud of him, and his sister, too. They both carry on like soldiers.

Paul had brought outside with him one of the birds from his dovecote. A mottled rock dove, a handsome winger. He toted it manfully to the curb, using the two-handed professional bird handler’s way he’s taught himself. I surveilled him like a spy, slumped behind the steering wheel, the shadow of the big túpelo making me not especially noticeable, though Paul was too intent on his own business to see me.

At the curb he took the pigeon in one small hand, slipped the hood and neatly pocketed it. The bird cocked its head peckishly at his new surroundings. The sight, though, of Paul’s familiar, serious face calmed it.

Paul studied the pigeon for a time, grappling it once again in both hands, and via the still darkness I could hear his boy’s voice talking. He was coaching the bird in some language he had practiced. “Remember this house.” “Fly this special route.” “Be careful of this hazard or that obstacle.” “Think of all we’ve worked on.” “Remember who your friends are”—all of it good advice. When he’d finished, he held the bird to his nose and sniffed behind its beaky head. I saw him close his eyes, and then it was up, pitched, the bird’s large bright wings seizing the night instantly, up and gone and out of sight like a thought, its wings white and then quickly small as it cleared the closure of trees—gone.

Paul looked up a moment, watching it. Then, as if he’d forgotten all about any loosed bird, he turned and stared at me across the street, slouched like Officer Carnevale in my cruiser car. He had seen me probably for quite some time, but had gone on with his business like a big boy who knows he’s watched and doesn’t care for it, but understands those are the rules.

Paul walked across the street in his little boy’s ungainly gait but with a gainly smile, a smile he’d give, I know, to a total stranger.

“Hi Dad,” he said through the window.

“Hi, Paul.”

“So what’s up?” He still smiled at me like an innocent boy.

“Just sort of sitting here now.”

“Is it all right?”

“It’s great. Whose car’s that out front there?”

Paul looked back behind him at the Thunderbird. “The Litzes.” (Neighbor, lawyer, no problem.) “Are you coming inside?”

“I just wanted to check up on you folks. Just being a patrol car.”

“Clary’s asleep. Mom’s watching news,” Paul said, adopting his mother’s way of dropping definite articles, a midwest mannerism.
They went to market. She has flu. We bought tickets
.

“Who was that you gave his freedom to?”

“Ole Vassar.” Paul looked up the street. Paul names his birds after hillbilly tunesters—Ernest, Chet, Loretta, Bobby, Jerry Lee—and had adopted his father’s partiality for
oie
as a term of pure endearment. I could’ve hauled him through the window and hugged him till we both cried out, so much did I love him at that moment. “I didn’t give him his freedom right off, though.”

“Old Vassar has a mission first, then?”

“Yes sir,” Paul said and looked down at the pavement. It was clear I was burdening his privacy, of which he has plenty. But I knew he felt he had to talk about Vassar now.

“What’s Vassar’s mission?” I asked bravely.

“To see Ralph.”

“Ralph. What’s he going to see Ralph for?”

Paul sighed a small boy’s put-on sigh, transformed back from a big boy. “To see if he’s all right. And tell him about us.”

“You mean it’s a report.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Head still down at the pavement.

“On all of us?”

“Yeah.”

“And how did it come out?”

“Good.” Paul avoided my eyes in another direction.

“My part okay, too?”

“Your part wasn’t too long. But it was good.”

“That’s all right. Just so I made it in. When’s Ole Vassar reporting back?”

“He isn’t. I told him he could live in Cape May.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Ralph’s dead. I think.”

I had taken him and his sister to Cape May only last fall, and I was interested now that he supposed the dead lived there. “It’s a one-way mission, then.”

“Right.”

Paul stared fiercely at the door of my car and not at me, and I could sense he was confused by all this talk of dead people. Kids are most at home with sincerity and the living (who could blame them?), unlike adults, who sometimes do not have an unironical bone in their bodies, even for things that are precisely in front of them and can threaten their existence. Paul’s and mine, though, has always been a friendship founded on sincerity’s rock.

“What do you know tonight to tickle me?” I said. Paul is a secret cataloger of corny jokes and can make anyone laugh out loud, even at a joke they’ve heard before, though he often chooses to withhold. I myself envy his memory.

For this question, though, he had to consider. He wagged his head backwards in pretend-thought, and stared into the tree boughs as if all the good jokes were up there. (What did I say about things always changing and surprising us? Who would’ve thought a drive down a dark street could produce a conversation with my own son! One in which I find out he’s in contact with his dead brother—a promising psychological indicator, though a bit unnerving—plus get to hear a joke as well.)

“Ummm, all right,” Paul said. He was all Johnny now. By the way he stuffed his hands in his pockets and averted his mouth I could tell he thought it was a pretty funny one.

“Ready?” I said. With anyone else this would spoil the joke. But with Paul it is protocol.

“Ready,” he said. “Who speaks Irish and lives in your back yard?”

“I don’t know.” I give in straight away.

“Paddy O’Furniture.” Paul could not hold back his laughter a second and neither could I. We both held our sides—he in the street, I in my car. We laughed like monkeys loud and long until tears rose in his eyes and mine, and I knew if we did not rein ourselves in, his mother would be out wondering (silently) about my “judgment.” Ethnics, though, are among our favorite joke topics.

“That’s a prize-winner,” I said, wiping a tear from my eye.

“I have another one, too. A better one,” he said, grinning and trying not to grin at the same time.

“I have to drive home now, sonny,” I said. “You’ll have to remember it for me.”

“Aren’t you coming inside?” Paul’s little eyes met mine. “You can sleep on the couch.”

“Not tonight,” I said, joy bounding in my heart for this sweet Uncle Milty. I would’ve accepted his invitation if I could, taken him up and tickled his ribs and put him in his bed. “Rain Czech.” (One of our oldest standbys.)