The Great American Novel (37 page)

“You.”

“Oh, darling,” and she kissed him feverishly. “Which do you love more, a shoestring catch, or me?”

“Oh, you.”

“Oh, my all-star Adonis! Which do you love more, dearest Luke, a fastball letter-high and a little tight, or me?”

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“Well, if I'm battin' left-handed, and we're at home—”

“Luke!”

“But then a' course, if I'm battin' rightie, you, Angel.”

“Oh, my precious, Luke, what about—what about a home run?”

“You or a home run, you mean?”

“Yes!”

“Well, now I really got to think … Why … why … why, I'll be damned. I got to be honest. Geez. I guess—you. Well, isn't that somethin'.”

He who had topped Ruth's record, loved her more than all his home runs put together! “My darling,” and in her joy, the fading beauty offered to Gofannon what she had withheld even from Cobb.

“And Luke,” she asked, when the act had left the two of them weak and dazed with pleasure, “Luke,” she asked, when she had him just where she wanted him, “what about … your triples? Whom do you love more now, your triples, or your Angela Whittling Trust?”

While he thought that one through, she prayed.
It has to be me. I am flesh. I am blood. I need. I want. I age. Someday I will even die. Oh Luke, a triple isn't even a person—it's a thing!

But the thing it was. “I can't tell a lie, Angela,” said the Loner. “There just ain't nothin' like it.”

Never had a man, in word or deed, caused her such anguish and such grief. This illiterate ballplayer had only to say “Nothin' like it” about those God damn triples for a lifetime's desire to come back at her as frantic despair. Oh, Luke, if you had only known me in my prime, back when Ty was hitting .420! God, I was irresistible! Back before the lively ball, oh you should have seen and held me then! But look at me now, she thought bitterly, examining herself later that night in her mirrored dressing room—just
look
at me! Ghastly! The body of a thirty-five-year-old woman! She turned slowly about, till she could see herself reflected from behind. “Face it, Angela,” she told her reflection, “thirty-six.” And she began to sob.

“Luke! Luke! Luke! Luke! Luke!”

It was only the name of a Patriot League center-fielder that she howled, but it came so piercingly from her throat, and with such pitiable yearning, that it might have stood for all that a woman, no matter how rich, beautiful, powerful, and proud she may be, can never hope to possess.

And then he was traded, and then he was dead.

And so that spring she took up with a Greenback rookie, a beautiful Babylonian boy named Gil Gamesh.

“Till I was eight or nine, I knew we was the only Babylonian family in Tri-City, but I figured there was more of us out in California or Florida, or some place like that, where it was warm all the time. Don't ask me how a kid gets that kind of idea, he just gets it. Bein' lonely, I suppose. Then one day I got the shock of my life when my old man sat me down and he told me we wasn't just the only ones in Tri-City, or even in Massachusetts, but in the whole damn U.S.A. Oh, my old man, he was a proud old son of a bitch, Angela—you would a' liked that old fire-eater. He wouldn't change his ways for nobody or nothin'. ‘What do you mean you're a Babylonian?' they'd ask him when he filled out some kind of form or somethin'—‘what the hell is God damn Babylonian supposed to be? If you're some kind of wop or Polack or somethin', say it, so we know where we stand!' Oh, that got him goin' all right, callin' him those things. ‘I Babylonian! Free country! Any damn thing—that
my
damn thing!' That's just what he'd tell 'em, whether it meant gettin' the job or losin' it. And so that's what I wrote down in school too, under what I was: Babylonian. And that's how come they started throwin' them rocks at me. Livin' down by the docks in those days, there wasn't any kind of person you didn't see. We even had some Indians livin' there, Red Indians, workin' as longshoremen, smokin' God damn peace pipes on their lunch hour. Christ, we had Arabs, we had
everythin'.
And they'd all take turns chasin' me home from school. First for a few blocks the Irish kids threw rocks at me. Then the German kids threw rocks at me. Then the Eye-talian, then the colored, then them Mohawk kids, whoopin' at me like it was some honest to Christ war dance; then down by the chop suey joint, the Chink's kid; then the Swedes—hell, even the Jew kids threw rocks at me, while they was runnin' away from the kids throwin' rocks at them. I'm tellin' you, it was somethin', Angela. Belgian kids, Dutch kids, Spanish kids, even some God damn kid from Switzerland—I never seen one before, and I never ever heard of one since, but there he is, on my tail, shoutin' at the top of his lungs, ‘Get outta here, ya' lousy little Babylonian bastard! Go back to where you belong, ya' dirty bab!' Me, I didn't even know what a bab was. Maybe those kids didn't either. Maybe it was somethin' they picked up at home or somethin'. I know my old man never heard it before. But, Christ, did it get him mad. ‘They you call bab? Or
bad?
Sure not
bad?
' ‘I'm sure, Poppa,' I told him. ‘Bab,' he'd say, ‘bab…' and then he'd just start goin' wild, tremblin' and screamin' so loud my old lady went into hidin'. ‘Nobody my boy bab call if here I am! Nobody! Country
free!
God damn
thing!
Bab they want—we them bab show all right
good!
' Only I didn't show them nothin', 'ceptin' my tail. When those rocks started comin' my way, I just up and run for my life. And that just made my old man even madder. ‘Free! Free! Underneath me?' That's how he used to say ‘understand.' Or maybe that's how all Babylonians say it, when they speak English. I wouldn't know, since we was the only ones I ever met. Don't worry, it got him into a lot of fights in bars and stuff, sayin' ‘underneath' for ‘understand' like that. ‘Don't again to let you them call bab on my boy—underneath?
Ever!
' ‘But they're throwin' rocks big as my head—at my head!' I told him. ‘Then back throw rock on them!' he told me. ‘Throw them big rock, throw you more big!' ‘But there are a hundred of them throwin', Poppa, and only one a' me.' ‘So,' he says, grabbin' me by the throat to make his point, ‘throw you more
hard.
And
strong! Underneath?
'

“So that's how I come to pitchin', Angela. I got myself a big pile a' rocks, and I lined up these beer and whiskey bottles that I'd fish outta the bay, and I'd stand about fifty feet away, and then I'd start throwin'. You mick bastard! You wop bastard! You kike bastard! You nigger bastard! You Hun son of a bitch! That's how I developed my pick-off play. I'd shout real angry, ‘Run, nigger!' but then I'd spin around and throw at the bottle that was the wop. In the beginnin', a' course, out on the street, bein' so small and inexperienced and all, and with the pressure on and so forth, I was so damn confused, and didn't know what half the words meant anyway, I'd be callin' the wops kikes and the niggers micks, and damned if. I ever figured out what in hell to call that kid from Switzerland to insult him—‘Hey,' I'd say, ‘you God damn kid from God damn Switzerland,' but by the time I got all that out, he was gone. Well, anyway, by and by I got most of the names straightened around, and even where I didn't, they stopped laughin', on account of how good I got with them rocks. And about then I picked up this here fierce way I got too, just by imitatin' my dad, mostly. Oh, those little boys didn't much care to chase me home from school anymore after that. And you should a' heard my old man crowin' then. ‘Now you them show what bab do! Now they underneath! And good!' And I was so damn proud and happy, and relieved a' course, and a' course I was only ten, so I just didn't think to ask him right off what else a bab could do. And then he up and died around then—they beat the shit out of him in a bar, a bunch of guys from Tierra del Fuego, who had it in for Babylonians, my mother said—and, well, that was it. I didn't have no father no more to teach me, so I never did know how to be the kind of Babylonian he wanted me to be, except by throwin' things and sneerin' a lot. And that's more or less what I been doin' ever since.”

A callow, untutored boy, a wharf rat, enraged son of a crazed father—no poem he, but still the greatest left-handed rookie in history, and nothing to sneer at at sixty-one … But then he threw that pitch at Mike Masterson's larynx, and Gil was an ex-lover too. To be sure, in the months after his disappearance, she had waited for some message from the exile, a plea for her to intervene in his behalf. But none came, perhaps because he knew that she was not the kind of woman whose intervention anyone would ever take seriously. “Speak a word to the Commissioner about that maniac,” her husband had cautioned her, “and I will expose you to the world, Angela, for the tramp that you are. Every loudmouth Ty and Babe and Gil who comes along!”

Even in her grief she found the strength to taunt him. “Would you prefer I slept with bullpen catchers?”

“Look at you, the carriage of Caesar's wife, and the morals of a high school harlot who pulls down her pants for the football team.”

“I have my diversions, Spenser, and you have yours.”

“Diversions? I happen to be the patron and the patriarch of a great American metropolis. I have made Tri-City into the Florence of America. I am a financier, a sportsman, and a patron of the arts. I endow museums. I build libraries. My baseball team is an inspiration to the youth and the men of the U.S.A. I could have been the Governor of this state, Angela. Some say I could have been the President of the country, if only I did not have as my wife a woman whose name is scribbled on locker room walls.”

“You diminish my accomplishments, Spenser, though, I must say, you certainly do justice to your own.”

“Babe Ruth,” he said contemptuously.

“Yes, Babe Ruth.”

“What do you do after you make love to Babe Ruth? Discuss international affairs? Or Benvenuto Cellini?”

“We eat hot dogs and drink pop.”

“I wouldn't doubt it.”

“Don't,” said Angela Whittling Trust.

“A woman,” he said bitterly, “with your aristocratic profile.”

“A woman does not live by her profile alone, my dear.”

“Oh? And in what ways is a baseball player able to gratify you that a billionaire is not?” He was a fit and handsome man, with no more doubt of his prowess in sex than in banking. “I'd be interested to learn wherein Babe Ruth is more of a man than Spenser Trust.”

“But he isn't more of a man, darling. He's more of a boy. That's the whole point.”

“And that is irresistible to you, is it?”

“To me,” said his wife, “and about a hundred million other American citizens as well.”

“You gum-chewing, star-struck adolescent! Hear me now, Angela: if at the age of sixty-one you should now take it into your selfish, spoiled head to sirenize a Tri-City Tycoon—”

“I assured you long ago that I would not cuckold you with any of your players. I realize by what a slender thread your authority, as it were, hangs.”

“Because I am not running a stud farm for aged nymphomaniacs!”

“I understand what you are running. It is something more on the order of a money-making machine.”

“Call it what you will. They are the most accomplished team in Organized Baseball, and they are not to be tampered with by a bored and reckless bitch who is utterly without regard for the rules of civilized life. A fastball pitcher's floozie! Whore to whomever hits the longest home run! That's all you are, Angela—a stadium slut!”

“Or slit, as the players so neatly put it. No, it wouldn't do for the Governor of the state to be married to a slit instead of a lady, would it, Spenser? And whoever heard of the President being married to a wayward woman? It isn't done that way in America, is it, my patron and patriarch?”

“To think, you have kept me from the White House just for the sake of debauching yourself with baseball stars.”

“To think,” replied his wife, “you would keep me from debauching myself with baseball stars, just for the sake of getting into the White House.”

That winter, while Angela waited in dread for the news that Gil Gamesh was dead (if not beaten to a pulp like his father before him, stomped to death by Tierra del Fuegans whom he had insulted in some poolroom somewhere, then dead by his own wrathful hand), her own husband was fatally injured in a train wreck. His broken body was removed from the private car that had been speeding him to Chicago for a meeting with Judge Landis, and Angela was summoned to the hospital to bid him farewell. When she arrived she found his bed surrounded by his lawyers, whom he had called together to be sure that the dynasty was in order before he took his leave of it; all fifteen attorneys were in tears when they left the room. Then the Tri-City Tycoons were called in. The regulars, like eight sons, stood on one side of the bed, the pitching staff lined up on the other, and the remaining players gathered together at his feet, which he himself could no longer feel; they had come in uniform to say goodbye. Hospital regulations had made it necessary for them to remove their spikes in the corridor, but once inside his room, they had donned them again and crossed the floor to the dying owner's bedside with that clackety-clack-clack that had always been music to his ears.

Angela stood alone by the window, hers the only dry eyes in the room. Dry, and burning with hatred, for Spenser had just announced that he had passed the ownership of the club on to his wife.

The players moved up to say farewell, in the order in which they batted. He grasped their powerful hands with the little strength that remained in his own, and when he spoke his last words to each of them, they had virtually to put their ears to his lips to understand what he was saying. He was fading quickly now.