" Your Mitchell just sent three of his classmates to the emergency room at the hospital," Mr. Featherstone replied sharply. "He's suspended for the next two weeks."
The aunts listened in horror to the details of their nephew's hallway brawl. They gazed at Mitch, first with bewilderment and then condemnation. Amity's eyes grew fierce behind her wire-rimmed spectacles. "You will come home with us at once, Mitchell," she ordered. "We will deal with this in private."
"We are extremely disappointed in you," Theodora exclaimed. "Extremely!"
He could see them conjuring up their most terrible punishment. A stern lecture, a hundred sentences instead of fifty. His heart contracted with love for them and regret at the distress he had inflicted. "Go on home," he said gently. "I'll be there in a little while."
Flabbergasted, they repeated their commands. He shook his head sadly. When they saw that they couldn't sway him, Amity tried to tidy the torn shoulder seam of his shirt, and Theodora told Jordan Featherstone that his school was full of hooligans.
Mr. Featherstone began to lecture him, but Mitch had something else to do. He apologized politely to the three adults. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't mean to be rude, but there's something I have to do."
He walked out of the school and made his way on foot to the emergency room at Clearbrook Memorial Hospital.
There he found Artie Tarpey, Herb McGill, and Charlie Shields, who was holding an ice pack to his nose. Mitch sat quietly with them while they waited their turn to get patched up. They talked about the Warrior's football team and whether they had a shot at division finals. They talked about the sophomore teachers and the tunes on the Top Forty. None of them mentioned the fight.
That fall Mitch broke forever his aunts' gentle domination. He landed a part-time job at a local television repair shop and fell in love with the relentlessly masculine world of electronics. When his school suspension was over, he patiently endured all of their duckings and twitterings, then kissed them affectionately on their papery cheeks and went out to train with the football team. Although the squad had already been chosen, his dogged persistence won him the admiration of the coaches, and by the end of the season he was playing.
In the next two years Mitch Blaine re-created football at Clearbrook High. No one had ever seen a boy play the game like he did. He wasn't the fastest wide receiver in the state, but he was so strong, so ferocious in his concentration, so single-minded in his race for the goal line, that it was almost impossible to stop him. The college scouts began sending him love letters.
Off the playing fields, Mitch was still the most well-behaved boy in Clearbrook, Ohio-quiet, polite, conservatively dressed, academically brilliant. The girls who had once laughed at him left notes in his locker and fought with each other for the right to ask him to a turnabout dance. One of those who fought for his attention was Candy Fuller. He was consistently courteous to her and relentlessly unforgiving.
In a cabin on the shores of Lake Hope, he and Penny Baker lost their virginities together. The experience was better than anything he had ever imagined, and he determined to repeat it as often as possible.
"Would you raise your seat back, Mr. Blaine? We're getting ready to land."
The flight attendant who smelled like his aunts' bathpowder stood next to his seat. He still missed those dear old ladies. They had died a few years ago, Amity passing on within three days of Theodora.
The flight attendant leaned over him deferentially. "Is Boston home, or are you here on business?"
"Home," he replied, although it no longer felt that way.
She chatted with him for a few minutes and couldn't quite hide her disappointment when he didn't ask for her phone number.
Mitch had long ago accepted the fact that he had a strong effect on women, but he hadn't given the matter much thought since his undergraduate days at Ohio State. He still didn't understand that the contrasts in his nature were what fascinated them. Women were drawn to his quiet courtesy and impeccable manners, but it was the juxtaposition of those gentler qualities with an almost ferocious masculinity that had made so many of them fall in love with him over the years.
Mitch didn't worry about his masculinity any more. He didn't have to. But when he had graduated from high school, it had been very much on his mind. He remembered leaving his aunts behind for his freshman year at Ohio State, and then he remembered his sophomore year, when he finally found the father figure he had been seeking for so long-Wayne Woodrow Hayes, the Buckeyes' legendary football coach.
Mitch smiled and shut his eyes. While the plane circled Logan Airport, he thought back to those Saturday afternoons when he had carried the football to glory in the horseshoe-shaped stadium on the banks of the Olentangy River. Even now he could hear the chimes of "Carmen Ohio" ringing in his mind. But most of all, he remembered Woody.
Everybody called the Buckeye football players dumb. A lot of them were dumb. Woody knew that. But he didn't like everybody else knowing it. When Woody first saw the hard-hitting, clean-living boy from Clearbrook, Ohio, in action, his eyes got misty. Not only did Mitch play the kind of single-minded, no-holds-barred football that Woody had invented, but he was carrying a 3.7 grade average in Electrical Engineering to go along with it.
Not Phys Ed.
Not Communication Arts.
Electrical Engineering.
Woody was a scholar, and he loved intelligent minds. His hobby was military history, and he laced his pregame speeches with references to his favorite men-Napoleon, Patton, and General Douglas MacArthur.
Mitch Blaine knew who they were.
Every Buckeye football player who wore the scarlet and gray respected and feared Woody Hayes, but that didn't keep them from joking about his old-fashioned sentiments behind his back. Mitch saw the humor in Woody, but he still loved listening to him talk. Woody believed in God, America, and Ohio State, in that order. He believed in back-breaking hard work and a strict moral code. And, gradually, Woody Hayes helped define for Mitch what it meant to be a man.
Mitch grew close to the crusty coach. Even after he was graduated from Ohio State and had gone on to MIT for his master's degree, he still telephoned him. One evening in the summer of 1969, Mitch called with the biggest news of his life.
"Coach, I've decided to get married."
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. "That red-haired young lady you brought over for me to meet the last time you were in Columbus?"
"Yes. Louise."
"I remember." Woody seemed to be collecting his thoughts. "She's from a rich family, you told me."
"Her people came to Boston with the Pilgrims."
Another long silence, and then Woody delivered his verdict. "She has thin blood, son. I advise you to reconsider."
Like a fool, Mitch hadn't listened.
Mitch's house smelled damp and empty when he let himself inside. He set his suitcase down and wished it could all be different, that he could walk upstairs and find David, his five-year-old son, and Liza, his three-year-old daughter, curled beneath the covers in their bedrooms. But those bedrooms were empty now, stripped of their furniture and the sweet scramble of toys he used to stumble over when he kissed them good night.
His housekeeper had cleaned up the mess from his alcoholic oblivion. As he carried his suitcase upstairs, he felt a curl of disgust in his gut from all that self-pity he had been wallowing in. During the first few weeks after Louise had left with the children, he had been able to function normally. But the house had been so empty at night that he had begun keeping company with a bottle of scotch, not the best companion for someone who had never been much of a drinker. Eventually, he had conceived an alcohol-inspired plan to stop working, buy a boat, and sail around the Caribbean for a while. He had managed to implement the first part of his plan, but the second and third parts had required too much energy. And then Sam Gamble had kidnapped him, and the small wonders he had seen in that garage in Silicon Valley had forced him to rejoin the world.