Maybe it was.
But it carried with it the absence I would always feel of my grandfather, the one Poxl had come to fill here in town. Before I knew enough to know, Poxl West had been in my life. He’d chosen to be there, not because he was duty-bound, bound by blood. His attention to me was the conscious bestowal of a gift, one that was renewed every time we saw each other. There I was, fifteen — the gift had been given, and now it was not being given, at just the moment when its magnitude was revealed, clouds parting to display morning’s spidery light. Was this what Françoise had felt when he left? Glynnis? His own mother? I’d lost a grandfather before I knew what it meant to have one, but in his place I had what every Ashkenazi kid in America needed without knowing he needed it: a Jewish war hero, at my side. When Poxl was around, he did fill in for my missing grandfather. Now it was like I’d lost two grandfathers in one sweep of Poxl West’s international success. Does this sound like obsession? Do I lament looking back, magnifying what Poxl was then? I only know that’s how it felt at the time. And that if I’m honest, it’s how I feel decades later.
One afternoon amid the unexpected blanching that had overtaken my days during that period, my father decided he would take up Poxl’s absence and take me to Waltham, to a store called Mr. Big Toyland. The toy store advertised regularly on local television stations. My parents were friends with the owner’s daughter — my father had helped them out with an audit years before, so we were treated well there. We got a small jolt from watching their kids thumbing their way through the Cabbage Patch Kids and G.I. Joes on those TV commercials — Ellen and Joseph, who’d been at my Bar Mitzvah, up there on television, enjoying some local fame. We knew them, and there they were on television, between episodes of Diff’rent Strokes. Fame feels larger when you’re fifteen: It appears to be its own reward. I’m not sure what I wanted to be acknowledged for, what I did at the time that deserved attention, but the idea of being on television was mesmerizing.
In addition to toys, Mr. Big sold baseball cards, the best selection of old cards in town. My parents thought spending money on baseball cards was a kind of institutionalized insanity. Usually I had to beg my father to take me out there.
Today he’d offered unbidden.
On the way out we passed through the wealthy town where Larry Bird, the best player on the Celtics team, had bought a large house after being drafted. He was known to spend afternoons outside in his driveway shooting baskets. There was something intimate about it, its own gift, seeing through the window of a car what we normally had to see on the screen of our television sets. It could back traffic up for miles, drivers stopping to watch his mastery, the perfect shot executed by a man with mangled, broken fingers on each hand that somehow came together to make him the best shooter of his generation.
When we arrived in Waltham, Mr. Big wasn’t there. One of the clerks — no one we knew — took out books of cards for us to look through.
“What about that Larry Bird Topps’?” my father said. It was twenty-five dollars, an exorbitant amount back then to spend on a card. “You were just talking about him.”
I told my father I wasn’t that into basketball cards, so we turned to the curio case that held baseball cards. There was a 1976 Topps Fred Lynn, statistics on the back documenting the year he won both Rookie of the Year and MVP. A Yastrzemski third year. Even a couple Mickey Mantles. Somehow they all seemed trivial compared to tales of Uncle Poxl’s feats of war. My father must have noticed something in my face. He turned to the clerk and pointed to a card on the top level.
“Ted Williams,” my father said. “’51 Bowman. You know he had to stop playing for more than two years, in his prime.”
“He did?” I said.
“Yeah, he enlisted in the army.”
“Really?”
“They say he gave up the best years of his career, the height of his hitting powers, to fight in the war.”
My father looked over the cards in the case where we were standing. I was a card collector and a Sox fan, and I’m sure I had to have heard this story before, but somehow it had never registered with me. It hadn’t stuck. Now I looked down at the cartoon depiction of Williams’s handsome face twisted upward, the bat swung back around his body at the end of a perfect cut.
“You want it?” my father said.
On the plastic case the card was held in, a white sticker read “$140.”
“Are you serious?” I said. My mother hated my baseball-card collecting, thought the money we spent on it was money wasted. Did I think at the time this was strange, my father overcompensating for Poxl’s absence? Because in remembering it now, I see it for what it was. I’d grown dour on a level that must have begun to concern him. Here we were, attempting to rectify it. If this fact registered subconsciously, it was quickly forgotten in the excitement of what we were about to do. I was getting a thing I wanted and never dreamed I could have.
“They say these will be a good investment in the long term,” my father said. “Like a relic of history. You’ll have to keep it in good shape — not take it out to show friends or anything.”
For weeks I’d wanted something I could put my hands on, something that had been denied to me: Poxl had promised to send books and he hadn’t, and though my father had bought us copies, that hadn’t sated me. But he’d recognized need in me, and here he’d pulled off an emotional sleight of hand: He’d gifted me something I didn’t know I wanted. We don’t eat because there is food. We eat because there is hunger. It didn’t occur to me then what Poxl West had been doing all along, filling in for my grandfather. He was attempting to plug an emotional hole, not to acknowledge it as one. Perhaps that’s what left me wanting in those days since his absence; and perhaps it was obsession, but not obsession with what I thought I was obsessed. It was a doubling down on absence. Wasn’t this the fissure I didn’t see then, what Poxl’s heroism did for me as well? Shouldn’t I have seen what Poxl didn’t see himself — that his bombing Nazi Germany didn’t undo his parents’ deaths, the morbid facts I was attempting to sidestep in putting down Wiesel in favor of West?
Should, shouldn’t. We can’t undo the past. The fact was I didn’t see it. It looks so clear now saying it, but that’s not what I saw. I saw Ted Williams’s handsome, expensive face staring up at me, and I saw Poxl West’s handsome face, and I felt sated. Who could blame my father for wanting to give it to me, and who could blame Poxl.
I didn’t feel any of that when I was fifteen years old and in possession of a baseball card so valuable I would never have thought I’d own it. On the ride home I clutched the paper bag the clerk had put the card in and looked out the window, thinking of someone other than my uncle for the first time in weeks.
The shift my father had helped make in my mind didn’t last long. I read about Ted Williams’s war heroism, but soon after I also read about his personality. Williams was known to be a surly figure — wouldn’t talk to fans, refused to sign autographs.
My uncle had sat and signed books for anyone who’d wanted one signed.
We went one weekend to visit my mother’s great-aunt Leah at her apartment in Quincy, the only one in her family who lived here in Massachusetts. She was by far the most Bostonian Bostonian in my mother’s family, and she subscribed to NESN so she could watch every game now that she was too old to travel from Quincy to Fenway. She told me about how she had once been on an airplane with Williams, in the mid-seventies.
“Wouldn’t so much as make eye contact with me when I went up to tell him I was a fan,” my great-great aunt Leah said. “I was wearing a Sox cap at the time and everything. Written the man off ever since.”