The Orphan manager, Lou Ed Dew, tried to convince Happy Polidori, the plate umpire, to scrap the first inning and start us over again. He seemed to think the CVL rule book forbid the playing of anything but a full nine-inning game after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I edged closer to the Orphan dugout to pick up the details of this bizarre squabble.
“I don’t recollect that rule, Lou Ed,” Polidori said.
“It’s in there,” Lou Ed Dew said. “I’m pritty shore. I’d bet money. I think I would.”
“Would you be as certain if the Orphans’d scored three runs in the first instead of the other way round?”
“Shore. Shore I would.”
“That’d be about the foolishest rule ever devised by man then,” Polidori said. “A team could hire a band to play the ‘Banner’ ever time its boys had a bad inning out to field and guv up a run or six. I mean, musicians for the Boll Weevils or the Linenmakers’d get rich.”
“Check the book, Polidori. Check the book!”
“I don’t have to.” Polidori lowered his mask and walked away from Lou Ed Dew. “Play ball! I mean, Resume play!”
Dunnagin took a fresh ball from Polidori and trotted with it over to Mr Roosevelt’s box. “Sir, would you be willing to throw out the”-he pretended to count in his head-“the sixth or seventh ball of this game?”
“Would I?” FDR said. “By gosh, Mr Dunnagin, I’d regard it as churlish-a missed opportunity-to refuse.”
Dunnagin flipped the ball to Mister JayMac and backed up about twenty paces. Mister JayMac handed the President the horsehide, and FDR rubbed it up like a New Englander shaping a snowball. He winked over one shoulder at Miss Giselle, then tossed the ball to Dunnagin, who reacted like Mr Roosevelt’d set his palm on fire. Then he thrust the ball up in the air. Our fans cheered their noggins off again. The organist cranked up a rowdy version-a really rowdy version-of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
“Thow it to your pitcher,” Polidori told Dunnagin.
“This baby’s going home with me,” Dunnagin said. “One day a kid of mine might like to have it.”
“The league’ll have to fine you for misappropriating CVL property,” Polidori said. “The league’ll-”
“Screw the league,” Dunnagin said. “Toss Mariani a fresh ball, Mr Ump.”
The game did resume. We Hellbenders played inspiredly, in the field and up to bat. I had two more hits in our opener, neither for extra bases, and fielded like FDR’s predecessor in office, a Hoover: thwup, thwup, thwup! I just sucked em up and howitzered em over to Henry.
It wasn’t close, but the President enjoyed himself. He knew Mister JayMac and Miss Giselle, he knew the Elshtains, he had field-level box seats behind the dugout. He had a Co-Cola, a bag of peanuts, and another Co-Cola. I wouldn’t swear to it, but he may’ve doctored that second Coke with a tot of something spiritous. A regular fella, for a Harvard man and a three-term president. It was pretty much a wonderwork I played as decent as I did, I spent so much time eyeing him sidelong and watching in literal dumfoundment how sprightly and pretty Miss Giselle-with her belief in, and hatred of, the so-called Eleanor Clubs-looked bantering with him.
In the bottom of the eighth, Henry, with only one hit to that point, polewhacked a curve off the fourth Orphan pitcher: a flabbergasting blast that cleared the outfield wall, the bleacher seats behind the wall, the parking lot outside, maybe even the Panhandle-Seminole Railway tracks slashing southeast to Camp Penticuff. People stood up to watch the ball soar. In the brief silence that fell over nearly every onlooker there, FDR’s high-tone tenor sounded in his open mike and vibrated in every speaker on the field:
“Swear to God, Clyde, that’s the most monsterish home run I’ve ever seen! Who is that fella?”
“Jumbo!” the crowd answered. “Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!”
Henry trotted the bases, running on stems he’d hack-sawed a foot shorter during the second presidency of Cleveland, listing in his trot like a man on a unicycle.
“Well, Jumbo my chum, congratulations,” said the President, this time deliberately using the mike. “I haven’t seen a shot carry that far since the U.S.S. Enterprise showed off her guns for me.”
Laughter. Applause. Henry crossed the plate, circled back to our dugout, and tipped his cap to Mr Roosevelt.
At some point during the twin bill’s intermission, FDR and his friends pulled out and rumbled over our highway of ramps to the parking lot. People saw him leaving, of course, but the Fourth of July hoopla on the field-an Army glee club, a quilt raffle-more or less covered his exit.
“I didn’t realize he couldn’t walk,” Sudikoff said between the two games.
“He can,” Nutter said. “With braces. But nobody wants to clack as far as he’d’ve had to in a set of leg braces.”
“I jes never realized,” Sudikoff said.
“You weren’t supposed to,” Nutter told him.
We took the second game too, although this one evolved into a pitching duel between Fadeaway Ankers and a clever ex-major leaguer known as Smiley Clough. The game ended three to one. Lou Ed Dew probably wished Mr Roosevelt had watched it instead of our scalp-em-bald romp in the opener. Aboard the Brown Bomber, riding back to McKissic House, I kept hearing FDR say, “Swear to God, Clyde, that’s the most monsterish home run I’ve ever seen!” You could tell from that remark how he’d become president; he just had an instinct about him.
38
Angus Road and the McKissic House estate had guards-Camp Penticuff MPs and specially assigned soldiers in battle dress-posted all around them.
Darius drove us past this armed picket line and up the curving drive to the boardinghouse, then along the grassy track between the boardinghouse and the wood-shingled carriage house, then past that garage straight down the clovery slope towards Hellbender Pond. Every player on the team was aboard the bus, not just McKissic House tenants.
The pond’s grassy bank boasted three open-sided tents with striped roofs and several trestle-legged picnic tables set out under them. A bank of big electric fans, powered by a noisy gas-powered generator, flanked the tents to keep us picnickers cool and mosquito-free. FDR and his party had already claimed one of these tents, and Marines or a Secret Service detail had furnished it with dining-room chairs and the back seat of the President’s touring car, which they’d removed and set in front of a table draped with a linen cloth and laid with china and crystalware.
Kizzy and a rail-thin part-time butler had put out barbecue and Brunswick stew from the pits at the ball field-also cole slaw, pickles, olives, deviled eggs, and suchlike fixings-but not on FDR’s table. He had a basket packed with fried chicken, California wine, and French bread. He didn’t like the vinegary tang of Suthren-style barbecue.
Darius parked not far from the tents, but kept his hand on the door lever, holding us in. “Yall knew Mister JayMac had a to-do planned out here. He jes didn’t know if the President tended to stay fo it. Looks like he has. Last thing Mister JayMac told me, if Mister Franklin stayed, was to ast yall to behave yosefs and do ol Highbridge proud.”