I don’t believe he ever considered himself gone. I shouldn’t be too hard on him. I try never to be. He was lying in bed in the ICU of the Boston VA.
“How are you doing?”
“You know, your grandfather had his first heart attack at forty-one. That’s a lot younger than me.”
“Yeah. How are you doing?”
“He lived another thirty years. You never met him.”
“I know.”
“He was the first pharmacist of his kind to practice in the city. Kenmore Drug. You know, he came up from the Carolinas with nothing. I don’t think he was even a teen.”
“Yeah.”
“They let him practice in the basement. He swept up upstairs.”
My father had torn up his knee as a high school halfback. He used to say that it cost him his free ride to Harvard but kept him out of Korea. When I was small, we’d play on the sidewalk in front of the old house. He’d call a play, break the huddle with a soft clap, and limp up to the ball, surveying the imagined defense. He’d hike it to himself and hand it off to me. After my run he’d watch me, a bit dreamily, jog back to him. “You really can hit the hole,” he’d say, taking the big ball back.
He must have sensed me regarding his scar, ashes, and bumpy, hairless follicles because he pulled at the hem of his johnny. It wasn’t long enough to cover, so I looked away.
“I’d go meet him at the store. The girl at the counter would give me a hard candy then send me down. He’d be gathering the filled prescriptions to bring upstairs. Your grandfather was very exacting.”
He scratched his stubble. His face, pockmarked from ingrown hairs, rasped like a zydeco washboard.
“He hit me once.”
He sucked on his loose teeth.
“We were just sitting down to dinner. I couldn’t have been much older than eight.”
He extended his right index finger into the air above his chest and pushed at something he saw.
“The doorbell rang. My father got up to answer it. From where I sat I could see that a policeman was at the door. My father called for me. There was another man on the porch, too. The man looked at me, turned to the policeman, and shook his head. My father told me to go sit down. I did. When he finished, he came in, sat, and said grace. I was just about to pick up my fork when all of a sudden I was on the floor. My cheek was numb. He was staring at me — cold. “Get up,” he said, really quiet. I got back in my chair. We ate dinner like nothing happened.
He inhaled thinly.
“I haven’t had a cigarette in three days.”
“That’s good. You shouldn’t smoke.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He pushed at the doorbell again and heard it ring in his head. I’d never seen a picture of my grandfather, but it had been said that he looked nothing like my old man. He never said much about his people at all except that they were “hard people. . mean people. .” That they used to own a town but were swindled out of it and had to move to northern Florida. The only one in his family he ever really loved was his maternal grandmother. She was the daughter of a medicine man. He only saw her once. My mother would roll her eyes or leave the room when he talked about her or how he thought that his father, who one day disappeared, was alive somewhere in the swamps.
“When the war came, they let him practice upstairs.”
“Then he got sick?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“How are you — you keeping your chin up?”
Marco’s just taken out the trash. He’s on the stoop wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. He sees me and waves. When I get closer, he points at my coffee.
“Staying up tonight?”
“Just a prop.”
He thumbs at the doorway. “Sox are on replay.”
Inside, the foyer lights are on low — halogen, recessed. They make the hall seem to curve where the walls meet the floor and ceiling — and it lengthens — a tube of soft light rimmed by shadow.
“Come on. Take a break.”
I sip the coffee. It’s weak and bitter. I haven’t watched a game all summer; perhaps out of self-punishment, perhaps because the game is no longer the game of my childhood, or perhaps it is and I’m no longer a boy. Somehow baseball lost its charm. I found it hard to root for corporate-sponsored mercenaries. From boy to man my feelings have turned from awe to envy to spite.
My father took me to Fenway. He’d watched the Braves as a boy. He’d seen Ruth’s last at bats. Then the Braves left and he became a Sox fan. He told me about the old park and the tradition: Young, Foxx, Doerr, Pesky, Williams, and what Yaz was like as a rookie. “He won the triple crown the year you were born — what a year.” He’d tell me stories — the curse, the Impossible Dream team — in that baritone crooner, Lucky Strike voice. Finally, one day he put me on his shoulders and walked us along the Charles to Kenmore Square, up Brookline Avenue, the bridge over the Mass Pike. We looked down at the cars speeding inbound and out. And then up to Lansdowne Street and the Monster with the net above. I got dizzy looking up at it in the vendor yells and smells. It seemed as though he knew, so we didn’t go in right away. He put me down among the legs and cart wheels and then disappeared up into the bodies and heads. When he returned, he handed me a sausage in a bun, flicking the peppers and onions off for me as he knelt. I ate it as we walked around the ballpark, east, behind the right-field bleachers, and then down the line toward home. I haven’t taken C yet. He hasn’t shown much interest — the Brooklyn boy. It was all I could do to keep Yankee paraphernalia out of the house — banners, hats, balls with imprints, bobble-head dolls, goodie bags from birthday parties. Once we burned a hat on the roof of our building and then tuned into the game on the radio. He fell asleep in his chair, the game he’d never played, the grandfather he barely knew, the field he’d never seen; all abstractions to him.
“Come on. They haven’t tanked yet,” Marco says while repositioning a garbage can. They haven’t, but they will. They always do in a manner so predictable that I can’t see it coming — the implosion. It’s late night. They’ll show a compressed version of the earlier live broadcast. I’ve heard some compare baseball to opera. Some have said that the Red Sox’s story is tragic. This replay then — only the highlight innings — is like a dark cantata.
I follow him inside, into the great windowed room. The television is on already. His laptop is open on the glass coffee table. He drops heavily onto the couch and waits for me to sit. He slides some stapled pages to me.
“What do you think of this?”
“What is it?”
“A legal document. What do you think of the writing?”
The first paragraph has three comma splices and one subject-verb disagreement.
“It’s a mess, right? It gets worse.”
I slide it back to him.
“They all graduated at the top of their classes from top schools, made law review. They can’t write for shit.” He pats the sheets. “But what burns me is they think they can. This was handed to me as a finished document. Now I have to stay up all night to correct the work of someone who sticks it to me every chance he gets that I didn’t go to Harvard.”
“The Red Sox take the field.”
“Fuckin’ bums. Come on, you fucks. . Oh,” he slides me a note, “someone called. He left a time and an address.”