Underworld (90 page)

“No no no no. We're speaking about the home run. Bobby Thomson's heroic shot. The tabloids have dubbed it for posterity.”

Bronzini had to pause to take this in.

“The Shot Heard Round the World? Is the rest of the world all that interested? This is baseball. I was barely aware. I myself barely knew
that something was going on. Heard round the world? I almost missed it completely.”

“We may take it that the term applies to the suddenness of the struck blow and the corresponding speed at which news is transmitted these days. Our servicemen in Greenland and Japan surely heard the home-run call as it was made on Armed Forces Radio. You're right, of course. They're not talking about this in the coffeehouses of Budapest. Although in fact poor Ralph Branca happens to be half Hungarian. Sons of immigrants. Branca and Thomson both. Bobby himself born in Scotland, I believe. You see why our wins and losses tend to have impact well beyond our borders.”

“You follow baseball then.”

“Only in distant memory. But I did devour today's reports. It's all over the radio. Something propelled this event full force into the public imagination. All day a steady sort of ripple in the air.”

“I don't follow the game at all,” Bronzini said.

He fell into remorseful thought. The girl appeared again, sullen in a limp blouse and shuffling loafers. Only four tables, theirs the only one occupied. The plain decor, the time-locked thickness in the air, the trace of family smell, even the daughter discontented—all argued a theme, a nonpicturesqueness that Albert thought the priest might note and approve.

“But baseball isn't the game we're here to discuss,” Paulus said.

In other shops the priest had made an appreciative show of selecting a pastry from the display case, with moans and exclamations, but was subdued today, gesturing toward the almond biscotti and asking the girl to bring some coffee. Then he squared in his chair and set his elbows firmly on the table, a little visual joke, and framed his head with cupped hands—the player taut above his board.

“I've been taking him to chess clubs,” Bronzini said, “as we discussed last time. He needs this to develop properly. Stronger opponents in an organized setting. But he hasn't done as well as I'd expected. He's been stung a number of times.”

“And when he's not playing?”

“We spend time studying, practicing.”

“How much time?”

“Three days a week usually. A couple of hours each visit.”

“This is completely ridiculous. Go on.”

“I don't want to force-feed the boy.”

“Go on,” Paulus said.

“I'm just a neighbor after all. I can push only so hard. There's no deep tradition here. He just appeared one day. Shazam. A boy from another planet, you know?”

“He wasn't born knowing the moves, was he?”

“His father taught him the game. A bookmaker. Evidently kept all the figures in his head. The bets, the odds, the teams, the horses. He could memorize a scratch sheet. This is the story people told. He could look at a racing form with the day's entries, the morning line, the jockeys and so on. And he could memorize the data of numerous races in a matter of minutes.”

“And he disappeared.”

“Disappeared. About five years ago.”

“And the boy is eleven, which means daddy barely got him started.”

“Adequate or not, on and off, I have been the mentor ever since.”

The priest made a gesture of appeasement, a raised hand that precluded any need for further explanation. The girl brought strong black coffee and a glass of water and some biscuits on a plate.

“The mother is Irish Catholic. And there's another son. One of my former students. One semester only. Bright, I think, but lazy and unmotivated. He's sixteen and can quit school any time he likes. And I'm speaking on behalf of the mother now. She wondered if you'd be willing to spend an hour with him. Tell him about Fordham. What college might offer such a boy. What the Jesuits offer. Our two schools, Andy, directly across the road from each other and completely remote. My students, some of them don't know, they remain completely unaware of the fact that there's a university lurking in the trees.”

“Some of my students have the same problem.”

Bronzini remembered to laugh.

“But what a waste if a youngster like this were to end up in a stockroom or garage.”

“You've made your plea. Consider your duty effectively discharged, Albert.”

“Dip your biscotto. Don't be bashful. Dip, dip, dip. These biscuits are direct descendants of honey and almond cakes that were baked in leaves and eaten at Roman fertility rites.”

“I think the task of reproducing the species will have to devolve upon others. Not that I would mind the incidental contact.”

Bronzini leaning in.

“In all seriousness. Have you ever regretted?”

“What, not marrying?”

Bronzini nodding, eyes intent behind the lenses.

“I don't want to marry.” And now it was the priest's turn to lean forward, shouldering down, sliding his chin near the tabletop. “I just want to screw,” he whispered electrically.

Bronzini shocked and charmed.

“The verb to screw is so amazingly, subversively apt. But conjugating the word is not sufficient pastime. I would like to screw a movie star, Albert. The greatest, blondest, biggest-titted goddess Hollywood is able to produce. I want to screw her in the worst way possible and I mean that in every sense.”

The small toothy head hovered above the table in defiant self-delight. Bronzini felt rewarded. On a couple of past occasions he'd taken the priest into shops and watched him taste the autumnal pink Parma ham, sliced transparently thin, and he'd offered commentaries on pig's blood pastry and sheets of salt cod. The visitor showed pleasure in the European texture of the street, things done the old slow faithful way, things carried over, suffused with rules of usage. This is the only art I've mastered, Father—walking these streets and letting the senses collect what is routinely here. And he walked the priest into the acid stink of the chicken market and pushed him toward the old scale hung from the ceiling with a lashed bird in the weighing pan, explaining how the poultryman gets twenty cents extra to kill and dress the bird—say something in Latin, Father—and he felt the priest's own shudder when the deadpan Neapolitan snapped the chicken's neck—a wiry man with feathers in his shirt.

“If I were not so dull a husband we might sit here and tell stories into the night.”

“Yours real, mine phantasmal.”

The priest's confession was funny and sad and assured Albert that he was a privileged companion if not yet a trusted friend. He enjoyed being a guide to the complex deposits around them, the little histories hidden in a gesture or word, but he was beginning to fear that Andy's response would never exceed the level of appreciative interest.

“And when you were young.”

“Was I ever in love? Smitten at seven or eight, piercingly. The purest stuff, Albert. Before the heavy hormones. There was a girl named something or other.”

“I know a walk we ought to take. There's a play street very near. I think you'd enjoy a moment among the children. It's a dying practice, kids playing in city streets. We'll finish here and go. Another half cup.”

He signaled the girl.

“Do you know the famous old painting, Albert? Children playing games. Scores of children filling a market square. A painting that's about four hundred years old and what a shock it is to recognize many games we played ourselves. Games still played today.”

“I'm pessimistic, you think.”

“Children find a way. They sidestep time, as it were, and the ravages of progress. I think they operate in another time scheme altogether. Imagine standing in a wooded area and throwing stones at the top of a horse chestnut tree to dislodge the sturdiest nuts. Said to be in the higher elevations. Throwing stones all day if necessary and taking the best chestnut home and soaking it in salt water.”

“We used vinegar.”

“Vinegar then.”

“We Italians,” Albert said.

“Soak it to make it hard and battle-worthy. And poke a hole through the nut with a skewer and slip a tough bootlace through the hole, a lace long enough to wind around the hand two or three times. It's completely vivid in my mind. Tie a knot, of course, to keep the chestnut secured to the lace. A rawhide lace if possible.”

“Then the game begins.”

“Yes, you dangle your chestnut and I bash it by launching my own with a sort of dervishy twirl. But it's finding the thing, soaking the thing, taking the time. Time as we know it now had not yet come into being.”

“I tramped through the zoo every year at this time to gather fallen chestnuts,” Bronzini said.

“Buckeyes.”

“Buckeyes.”

“Time,” the priest said.

Across the room the girl filled the cups from a machine. Father Paulus waited for her to slide his cup across the table so he could let the aromatic smoke drift near his face.

Then he said, “Time, Albert. Both of you must be willing, actually, to pay a much higher price. Hours and days. Whole days at chess. Days and weeks.”

Bronzini had his opening, finally.

“And if I'm not willing? Are you? Or not able. If I'm not able to do it. Not equal to the job. Are you, Andy?”

The priest looked at the knot in Albert's tie.

“I thought you wanted advice.”

“I do.”

“Please. Do you think I'd even consider tutoring the boy? Albert, please. I have a life, such as it is.”

“You're far more advanced than I, Father. You're a tournament player. You understand the psychology of the game.”

Paulus sat upright in his chair, formally withdrawing, it seemed, to a more objective level of discourse.

“Theories about the psychology of the game, frankly, leave me cold. The game is location, situation and memory. And a need to win. The psychology is in the player, not the game. He must enjoy the company of danger. He must have a killer instinct. He must be prideful, arrogant, aggressive, contemptuous and dominating. Willful in the extreme. All the sins, Albert, of the noncarnal type.”

Chastened and deflated. But Albert felt he had it coming. The man's remarks were directed at his own genial drift, of course, not the boy's. His complacent and easy pace.

“He shows master strength, potentially.”

“Look, I'm willing to attend a match or two. Give you some guidance if I can. But I don't want to be his teacher. No no no no.”

Now the grandmother appeared with an opened bottle of anisette
crusted at the rim. When Bronzini asked how she was feeling she let her head rock back and forth. The liqueur was a gesture reserved for select customers and took earning over time. She poured an ashy dram into each demitasse and the priest colored slightly as he seemed to do in the close company of people who were markedly different. Their unknown lives disconcerted him, making his smile go stiff and bringing to his cheeks a formal flush of deference.

She left without a word. They watched her glide moon-slow into the dimmed inner room.

“I don't know what to tell you about the older brother,” Paulus said.

“Never mind. I asked only because the mother asked. It will all straighten itself out.”

“We have an idea, some of us, that's taking shape. A new sort of collegium. Closer contact, minimal structure. We may teach Latin as a spoken language. We may teach mathematics as an art form like poetry or music. We will teach subjects that people don't realize they need to know. All of this will happen somewhere in the hinterland. We'll want a special kind of boy. Special circumstances,” Paulus said. “Something he is. Something he's done. But something.”

When they stood to leave and the priest was gathering his books, Bronzini took his cup, the priest's, and drained it of sediment, tipping his head quickly—espresso dregs steeped in anisette.

They shook hands and made vague plans to stay in touch and Father Paulus started on the short walk back to the Fordham campus and Albert realized he'd forgotten his own suggestion about visiting the play street nearby. Too bad. They might have ended on a mellower note.

But when he walked past the street it was nearly emptied out. A few boys still playing ringolievio, haphazard and half speed, the clumsy fatboy trapped in the den, always caught, always
it,
the slightly epicene butterfat bulk, the boy who's always reaching down to lift a droopy sock and getting swift-kicked by the witlings and sadists.

Is that what being
it
means? Neutered, sexless, impersonalized.

Dark now. Another day of games all ended, or nearly all—he could hear the boys' following voices as he made his way down the avenue. And when it ends completely we find ourselves abandoned to our sodden teens. What a wound to overcome, this passage out of childhood,
but a beautiful injury too, he thought, pure and unrepeatable. Only the scab remains, barely seen, the exuded substance.

Ringolievio coca-cola one two three.

A faint whiff of knishes and hot dogs from the luncheonette under the bowling alley. Then Albert crossed the street to Mussolini park, as the kids called it, where a few old men still sat on benches with their folded copies of II Progresso, the fresh-air inspectors, retired, indifferent or otherwise idle, and they smoked and talked and blew their noses in the street, leaning over the curbstone with thumb and index finger clamped to old shnozzola, discharging the stringy stuff.

Albert wanted to linger a while but didn't see anyone he knew and so he joined the small army of returning workers coming around the bend from Third Avenue, from the buses and elevated train.

Time, finally, to go home.

She sat there, Rosemary Shay, doing her beadwork. She had the frame set on two small sawhorses. She had the four bolts screwed in that held the frame together, those bolts with wing nuts at one end. She had the material pinned to the edges of the frame. She had the wood-handled needle that she used to string the beads onto the material, following the printed design—greenish beads arrayed on a flossy thread.