The Great American Novel (36 page)

“He was a lot of man.”

“Mine here is thirty-four inches, thirty-two ounces, ya' know. That's how come the writers say I ‘snap the whip.' That's how come I got that drivin' force, see. It ain't because my wrists is weak that I like the narrow handle, it's because they're so damn strong. And that's the truth. My forearms and my wrists are like steel, Mrs. Trust. Want to feel them and see for yourself? Want to see me take my cut now? In slow motion? I can swing real slow for ya', and ya' can follow it to see just how damn level it is. Hey, want to try an experiment with a coin? When I'm standin' in there, waitin' for the pitch, ya' know, I hold the big end of the bat so straight and so still, ya' can balance a dime on the end of it. And that's the truth. Most fellas, when they start that sweep forward, they got some kind of damn hitch or dip in there, so tiny sometimes you can't even see it without a microscope—but just try to balance a coin on that big end there when they start their swing, and you see what happens. They see that ball acomin' at them, and they will drop their hands, maybe only that much, but that is all it takes to throw your timin' to hell. And your power too. Nope, there is only one way to be a great hitter like me, and it ain't movin' the bat in two directions, I'll tell ya'. Same with the stride. Me, I just raise up my front foot and set it back down just about where I raised it up from. You don't
need
no more stride than that. I see fellas take a big stride, I got to turn away—that's true, Mrs. Trust, it actually makes me nauseous to look at, and I don't care if it's Ott himself. They might just as easy put a knife to themselves and slice off two inches of good shoulder muscle, because that's what they are givin' away in leverage. I just don't understand why they want to look like tightrope walkers up there, when all you got to do with that foot is just
raise
it up and
set
it down. A' course, you got to have eyes too, hut then I don't have to tell you about my eyes. They say my eyes are so sharp that I can read the General's signature off a fastball comin' up to the plate. Well, if that's what the pitchers wanna tell each other, that's okay with me. But between you and me, Mrs. Trust, I ain't some eagle that can read handwritin' comin' at me at sixty miles a hour—all I
can
tell is if the thing is goin' to break or not, because of the way them stitches are spinnin'. If you want, I could stand behind home plate with you durin' battin' practice, and you tell the pitcher to mix 'em up however he likes and ninety per cent of the time I promise I will holler out the curveballs even before they break. Maybe I
could
read General Oakhart's signature on a change-up, but frankly I ain't never bothered to try. It ain't goin' to help me get a base hit, is it—so why bother? Want to see me swing again?”

By now the pistol lay in her lap like a kitten.

“Want to see me take my cut now?” Agni repeated, when the old woman remained frozen, seemingly uncomprehending in her chair. “Mrs. Trust?”

He's Luke Gofannon,
she was thinking,
it's Luke Gofannon all over again.

*   *   *

There had been five men in her life who mattered, and none had been her husband; her affair with him had begun only after he was in the ground. Of the five—two Mundys, a Greenback, a Yankee, and a Tiger—she had loved only one with all her heart, the Loner, Luke Gofannon. Not that he was a fiercely passionate man in the way of a Cobb or a Gamesh; no, it was the great haters who made the great lovers, or such had been Angela's experience with America's stars. To yield to the man who had stolen more bases than anyone in history—by terrifying as many with his menacing gaze as with his surgical spikes—was like nothing she had ever known before as a woman; it was more like being a catcher, blocking home plate against a bloodthirsty base runner, than being a perfumed beauty with breasts as smooth as silk and a finishing school education; she felt like a base being stolen—no, like a bank being robbed. Throughout he glared down at her like a gunman, snarling in his moment of ecstasy, “Take that, you society slit!” But then, where another would collapse with a shudder, shrivel up, and sleep, the great Ty would (as it were) just continue on around the bag and try for two; and then for three! And then he would break for the plate, and to Angela's weary astonishment, make it, standing! a four-bagger, where another player would have been content with a solid base hit! The clandestine affair that had begun in his hotel room in 1911—on the day he won the batting crown with an average of .420—came to a violent end at the conclusion of the 1915 season, when he decided to perform upon her an unnatural act he described as “poling one out of the ball park foul.” Actually she did not so much resist as take longer to think it over than he had patience for, or pride. Having stolen his record-breaking ninety-six bases that year, he was not accustomed to waiting around for what he wanted.

According to the next day's newspapers, Mrs. Trust suffered her broken nose in the bath of a Detroit hotel room; true enough, only she had not got it by “slipping in the tub,” as the papers reported.

The Yankee was Ruth. How could she resist?

“George? This is Angela Whittling Trust. We happen to be in the same hotel.”

“Come on up.”

“With Spenser or without?”

“Surprise me.” He laughed. It was October of 1927; he had already hit sixty home runs in the course of the regular season, and that afternoon, in the third World Series game against the Pirates, he'd hit another in the eighth with two on.

Surprise me,
the Bambino had said, but the surprise was on her when he answered her knock, for the notorious bad boy was unclothed and smoking a cigar. Still slender, still silken, Angela was nonetheless a white-haired woman of fifty-five in the fall of '27, and in her silver-fox cape the last woman in the world one would think to greet in anything but the manner prescribed by society. Which was of course why the Babe had chosen to appear nude at the door—and why Mrs. Trust had entered without any sign that she was discomfited in the slightest. Of course he was a clown, a glutton, an egomaniac, a spoiled brat, and a baby through and through … but what was any of that beside those tremendous home runs?

“I been expectin' ya', Whittlin' Trust.”

“Have you now.” She removed her cape and draped it over a trophy that the Babe had placed to ice in a champagne bucket. What wit. What breeding. She took a good look at him—what legs. But who cared, with all those home runs?

“Since when?” Angela asked, removing her gloves in a most provocative way.

“Since 1921, Whittlin' Trust.”

“Really? You thought I'd ring you up for fifty-nine home runs, did you?”

He smiled and sucked his cigar. “And one hundred seventy r.b.i.s. And a hundred seventy-seven runs. And a hundred nineteen extra-base bits. Yeah, Whittlin' Trust,” said the Yankee immortal, chortling, “as a matter of fact, I thought you might.”

“No,” she said, as she set down her watch and her rings and began to unbutton her blouse, “I thought it would be best to wait. I have my reputation to consider. How was I to know you weren't just another flash-in-the-pan, George?”

“Come 'ere, W.T., and I'll show you how.”

A season with Ruth—and then in '29, the first of her pitchers, the first of her Mundys, the speedballer, Prince Charles Tuminikar. Yes, they called him a prince when he came up, and they called swinging and missing at that fastball of his “chasin' Charlies.” That was all he bothered to throw back then, but it was enough: 23–4 his rookie year, and by July 4 of the following season, 9–0. Then one afternoon, locked in a 0–0 tie going into the fourteenth, he killed a man. Everyone agreed it was a chest-high pitch, but it must have been coming a hundred miles an hour at least, and a dumb rookie named O'del, the last pinch-hitter off the Terra Inc. bench, stepped into the damn thing—exactly as Bob Yamm was to do against Ockatur thirteen years later—and he was pronounced dead by the umpire even before the trainer could make it out to the plate with an ice pack. Everyone agreed O'del was to blame, except Tuminikar. He left the mound and went immediately to the police station to turn himself in.

Of course no one was about to bring charges against a man for throwing a chest-high pitch in a baseball game, though maybe if they had, he could have served four or five years for manslaughter, and come on out of jail to be his old self on the mound. As it was, he never threw a fastball of any consequence again, or won more games in a season than he lost. Or was worth much of anything to Angela Whittling Trust.

And so it was, in her sixtieth year, that she came to Luke Gofannon, the silent Mundy center-fielder who had broken Ruth's record in 1928, as great a switch-hitter as the game had ever known, a man who made both hitting and fielding look like acts of meditation, so effortless and tranquil did he appear even in the midst of running with the speed of a locomotive, or striking at the ball with the force of a pile driver.

“You're poetry in motion,” said Angela, and Luke, having reflected upon this observation of hers for an hour (they were in bed), remarked at last:

“Could be. I ain't much for readin'.”

“I've never seen anything like you, Luke. The equanimity, the composure, the serenity…”

To this he answered, in due time, “Well, I ain't never been much for excitement. I just take things as they come.”

His exquisitely proportioned, powerful physique in repose—the repose itself, that pensive, solitary air that had earned him his nickname—filled Angela with a wild tenderness that she had not known as mistress to the ferocious Tiger, the buffoonish Yankee, and the ill-fated fireballer they now called Jolly Cholly T.; he awakened an emotion in her at once so wistful and so full of yearning, that she wondered if perhaps she should not have been a mother after all, as Spenser had wanted her to be, a good mother and a good wife. But before another season began, she would be sixty. Her face, her breasts, her hips, her thighs, for all that she had given them everything money could buy (yes, these had been her children), soon would be the face, breasts, and thighs of a thirty-five-year-old woman. And then what would she do with her time?

“I love you, Luke,” she told the Loner.

Another hour passed.

“Luke? Did you hear me, darling?”

“I heard.”

“Don't you want to know
why
I love you?”

“I know why, I guess.”

“Why?”

“My bein' a pome.”

“But you
are
a poem, my sweet!”

“That's what I said.”

“Luke—tell me. What do you love most in the world? Because I'm going to make you love me just as much. More! What do you love most in the entire world?”

“In the entire world?”

“Yes!”

It was dawn before he came up with the answer.

“Triples.”

“Triples?”

“Yep.”

“I don't understand, darling. What about home runs?”

“Nope. Triples. Hittin' triples. Don't get me wrong, Angela, I ain't bad-mouthin' the home run and them what hits 'em, me included. But smack a home run and that's it, it's all over.”

“And a triple?” she asked. “Luke, you must tell me. I have to know. What is it about the triple that makes you love it so much? Tell me, Luke, tell me!” There were tears in her eyes, the tears of jealous rage.

“You sure you up to it?” asked Luke, as astonished as it was in his nature to be. “Looks like you might be gettin' a little cold.”

“You love the triple more than Horace Whittling's daughter, more than Spenser Trust's wife—
tell me why!
”

“Well,” he said in his slow way, “smackin' it, first off. Off the wall, up the alley, down the line, however it goes, it goes with that there crack. Then runnin' like blazes. 'Round first and into second, and the coach down there cryin' out to ya', ‘Keep comin'.' So ya' make the turn at second, and ya' head for third—and now ya' know that throw is comin', ya' know it is right on your tail. So ya' slide. Two hunerd and seventy feet of runnin' behind ya', and with all that there momentum, ya' hit it—whack, into the bag. Over he goes. Legs. Arms. Dust. Hell, ya' might be in a tornado, Angela. Then ya' hear the ump—‘Safe!' And y're in there … Only that ain't all.”

“What then? Tell me everything, Luke! What then?”

“Well, the best part, in a way. Standin' up. Dustin' off y'r breeches and standin' up there on that bag. See, Angela, a home run, it's great and all, they're screamin' and all, but then you come around those bases and you disappear down into the dugout and that's it. But not with a triple … Ya' get it, at all?”

“Yes, yes, I get it.”

“Yep,” he said, running the whole wonderful adventure through in his mind, his eyes closed, and his arms crossed behind him on the pillow beneath his head, “big crowd … sock a triple … nothin' like it.”

“We'll see about that, Mr. Loner,” whispered Angela Trust.

Poor little rich girl! How she tried! Did an inning go by during the two seasons of their affair, that she did not know his batting average to the fourth digit? You're batting this much, you're fielding that much, nobody goes back for them like you, my darling. Nobody swings like you, nobody runs like you, nobody is so beautiful just fielding an easy fly ball!

Was ever a man so admired and adored? Was ever a man so worshipped? Did ever an aging woman struggle so to capture and keep her lover's heart?

But each time she asked, no matter how circuitously (and prayerfully) she went about it, the disappointment was the same.

“Lukey,” she whispered in his ear, as he lay with his fingers interlaced beneath his head, “which do you love more now, my darling, a stolen base, or me?”