“There he is,” he said. “Rewind it.” We watched Matty and the Rookie appear again, and then he told me to turn it off. He was uncharacteristically silent for the rest of the afternoon, but before dinner I heard him talking to his mother in the bath. “He had his hands up like this,” he was saying chattily. “I don’t know why.”
Sometime that month I began to think that it was time to round off the Rookie story, give it a suitably grand ending, turn the legend into a myth; I would find another story. I was having a hard time thinking of new plots, and anyway, it had been two years.
It was, at last, the seventh game of the 1908 World Series.
The Rookie had started three for the Giants, Matty the others. (Of course we had made the Giants, not the Cubs, grab the gonfalon on the final day.) It was the bottom of the ninth, the score tied one to one on homers by the Chief and Sam Crawford. Cobb was up. He dragged a bunt and headed for first, and this time he didn’t just spike the Rookie; he actually slid into first base, razor-clad feet up. Hit hard, the Rookie held on to the ball. But the umpire ruled that the ball had rolled foul down the first-base line. The Rookie was bleeding, fed up, homesick, crowded by a ringer like Gizmo McGee, a Tiger midget pretending to be a four-year-old, and he had endured a full season (in two years) of cruel torment at the hands of this terrible man. So he did an awful thing: He loaded up and threw his best fastball right at Ty Cobb’s head, threw so hard that Cobb’s head came right off, popped up high, before settling back down, with a surprised look, on his shoulders.
Umpire Bill Klem checked out Cobb—he was OK; the Rookie knew what he was doing—and then looked at the Rookie. “You’re outta here, Rookie,” he said, giving him the longest, slowest, saddest thumbing heave-ho that the major leagues have ever seen. “There’s just no throwing at people in baseball.” The crowd sat silent, disbelieving. The Rookie, head bowed, walked off the field.
And (I said) he kept walking. The Chief and Matty and Mr. McGraw were waiting for him in the dugout, but he walked away from them, didn’t even stop to take off his uniform in the center field clubhouse, just kept walking, right out of the Polo Grounds, day after day, week after week, until he was back in Anywhere, U.S.A., still in his uniform. His mother didn’t ask any questions. She hugged him, helped him out of his uniform (she hung it in the closet), and asked him if he wanted something to eat, and the next day he went back to school. His legend grew, but he never picked up a ball again.
Luke sat up. “He did not go home to his mother,” he said clearly. I felt horrible, as evil as Ty Cobb. I saw in his eyes what seemed to me not anger, exactly, but something more like doubt, religious doubt as it is described in nineteenth-century novels. What if the Rookie hadn’t risen again? What if the story had been only a story? What if someone was obviously manipulating it for a moral purpose? He had the relics and the photos, but like a true believer, he knew that it was all just talk if the Rookie didn’t rise again.
“He did not go home to his mother,” he said again, and as quickly as I could, in a panic, I turned it around. Of course not, I said. He went home for that day, to relax. The next day a delegation from both leagues was in his front yard, insisting that he come back to the Giants. “Baseball can’t survive without you, kid,” said Ban Johnson, president of the American League. Even Cobb himself, bandaged and sheepish, was there. Finally the Rookie agreed to come back—“But no more dirty tricks,” he said—and they played an eighth game (as they’d done once before), which he won.
“You told the story wrong,” he said finally. (And the next day he said to his mother, “Daddy told the Rookie story wrong.”) So the story goes on, only now it is much more under the child’s control. The Rookie soon entered a Gothic phase, as the little boy began to demand scary Rookie stories (“With a real witch. Not Ty Cobb dressed up like a witch. Not the Chief dressed up like a witch. A real witch”) and, more recently, a decadent phase. The current story, for instance, involves Sherlock Holmes, the genie from Aladdin, a T. rex, and the Pirate King from Pirates of Penzance. Having been, if only momentarily, betrayed by the story, he was doing what the literary critics would call “contesting the narrative.” The story belongs to him now.
My Rookie never really played ball again, no matter how many stories I tell, any more than Sherlock Holmes really came back alive from the Reichenbach Falls, no matter how many stories Conan Doyle wrote about him afterward. I think the Rookie just went home to Anywhere, U.S.A., and back to school like all the other kids.
Luke and I tried playing a little catch this spring in the Luxembourg Gardens but gave up after about five minutes. For a present, around that time, he asked us to make him his own carte d’identite, marked with a metier de journaliste—a press pass from the government—so that he could pretend to cut through red tape. We made him an impressive-looking fake government document, with a black-and-white photo and lots of cryptic, official-looking stamps. At bedtime now before the Rookie story starts, he likes to act out a French bureaucratic drama: I play a functionary guarding an entrance to something or other who scowls at him until he haughtily flashes his carte, and then I let him pass with many apologetic, ah-monsieur-I-did-not-recognize grimaces and shrugs, while his mother acts out the role of irate bystander, fuming in line as the privileged functionary serenely passes by. I suppose it is about time we took him home.
I don’t think about the Rookie as much as I used to, but when the bombs began to fall in Serbia I began thinking about that other Serbian conflagration, in 1914, and everything it had led to, and I realized with a start that by making the Rookie three years old in 1908, I was leaving him, unprotected, to the century’s horrors. Then I did a quick calculation and realized that he would have been far too young for the First War, and just too old for the Second. The Rookie was lucky that way, I think.
THE MACHINE TO DRAW THE WORLD
(Serenity is found in calm and contemplation, and the deep tragedy of history revealed. All chords are sounded and the bella rung in the birth of a new French baby.)
The World Cup, and After
The World Cup soccer tournament got off to a strange, promising start with a pageant that closed down Paris—a seventeenth-century-style allegorical masque, with music and dance and speech, which featured four sixty-five-foot-high inflatable giants that walked across the city from four Parisian monuments (the Opera, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the pont Neuf) to the place de la Concorde. The giants were steel-framed latex-covered figures—dolls, really—with fork-lift trucks for feet, and hydraulic hinged arms and hips and shoulders, and even moving eyelids. They turned their heads, and shifted their gaze, and raised their arms in wonder as they slowly shuffled along the Paris streets. Each one was a different color and represented a racial type. There was Romeo, the European; Pablo, the Amerindian; Ho, the Asian; and Moussa, the African (he had purple skin). It took four hours for them to get from their starting points to the place, where they bowed to one another, and the whole spectacle was broadcast live on television, while Juliette Binoche breathed over the loudspeakers on the streets and to the audience at home. (“The giants confront each other, but do they see a stranger or themselves?” etc.) The theme of the masque seemed to be the Self and the Other; the giants, never having seen one another before—or anything else, apparently—wake in the middle of Paris, to find their Selfness in the Others. Apart from that, the commentators on French television were hard put to find something to say as the big guys inched their way along the boulevards toward this revelation and at one point were reduced to noting that the technology that had produced the hydraulic giants had military applications, leaving you with the comforting knowledge that if NATO is ever in need of a crack synchronized team of huge, slow-moving inflatable dolls, the French will be the ones to call. (One sees them cornering a particularly sluggish war criminal in a Montenegrin mountain hideaway with a very large door.)